Discussion: The first term in Equation REF  (i.e., \(g_\mathcal {G}\) ) reflects the the width of the network \(w_c\) . Many successful DNN architectures, such as DenseNets [1]}, Wide-ResNets [2]}, and MobileNets [3]}, have shown that wider networks can achieve a higher test performance. The second term (i.e., \(g_\mathcal {R}\) ) quantifies how densely the nodes are connected through the skip connections. As discussed in [4]}, networks with more skip connections have more forward/backward propagation paths, thus have a better test performance. Based on the above analysis, we claim that a higher NN-Degree value should indicate networks with higher test performance. We verify this claim empirically in the experimental section. Next, we propose an accuracy predictor based only on the NN-Degree.
